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So, Turtle Island Restoration Network is a non-profit, and
it's like an umbrella organization
for,um, there's the
Sea Turtle Restoration Project,
and that's an international
advocacy project
that does
policy and
research and education on sea turtles around the world. Um,
the other one there is SPAWN
and that's based up in Marin and
around the Lagunitas Creek watershed is where our office is
and the Lagunitas Creek watershed is the, um,
really the biggest remaining stronghold of
wild coho salmon, an endangered species, in the central California ESU.
Uh, there's other watersheds that might have more in that ESU, but ours is the one that doesn't have a hatchery. And we're proud of the fact that
we maintain
this wild stock of coho.
Um, then we have Shark Stewards, which is another project that just actually
joined us.
Shark Stewards is still Sea Stewards with David MacGuire, and
David's now on our team
and he's got a desk next to mine and he's taken
Sea Stewards and
turned it into Shark Stewards.
He was really instrumental in authoring and passing
the ban on shark fins in California that was a law
last year,
AB376.
So uh...
there was a rider attached to that. It really won't be
illegal for the,
for stores to possess
shark fins until 2013, but in the meantime we know that it's illegal for them to have them in
commerce right now. So no
new shark fins should be passing in to California
And you know, the, the effort is really gaining a lot of momentum
and the Shark Stewards, uh, have introduced a similar law to AB376 in
Texas, Illinois, Indiana, and we're working on
New York and a couple other states too. So we're trying to take this policy change, you know
state by state.
Uh... things in Washington DC aren't moving so smoothly.
So the last project is
Got Mercury? and Got Mercury? is a public education and
uh... also a science project that
volunteers that we get with the Got Mercury? project go to
restaurants and
sushi restaurants
and get samples of
seafood
and test if for mercury and put out a report and work with the
media to share the news that there's still this issue
of high mercury content in seafood
Usually the highest level seafood like swordfish, tuna, etcetra are the
higher
mercury concentration
and that could be
a risk for
women, especially children, and especially women having children, uh, biggest risk.
So, uh, Turtle Island. Our main headquarters is up on Sir Francis Drake Boulevard in West Marin
and we're a park partner. We're on
Golden Gate, uh, GGNRA land, and you know, we love being up there, it's really beautiful. It's uh, it's an
ongoing restoration site actually. We are
working with Fish and Game to
improve the habitat, bring down fences, you know, take out some of the invasive plants, do a lot of planting of
native plants with SPAWN
and it's been really great, so uh...
really pleased to be here with
you guys today
to talk about the sea turtles. Um,
and here we go, we've got four
main sea turtles that we're gonna see in California
and we'll just try to figure this out, ok. Anybody have any guess about which sea turtle this one is?
This one
it's kinda tinted green and it's a green sea turtle, absolutely.
So green sea turtles are actually
down near San Diego.
There's a population of about a hundred
of them that live there and they're adults
and there's one that's like a 350 pounder. It's really big.
The green sea turtle gets to be the second largest species of sea turtle in the world.
There's seven species, total. One of them,
the Kemp's ridley, lives only in the Gulf of Mexico in the Eastern
Seaboard.
The other, the flatback sea turtle, breeds only in Australia and is in the Indian Ocean
and the South Pacific there.
So those aren't in California.
The green sea turtle as an adult is a vegetarian. So,
this is another sea turtle species that's got a big head. Which one is that?
Anyone ever heard of that?
Say it again..Loggerhead! Yes, so we got the green, the loggerhead.
Most loggerheads in the Pacific
are born in Japan, so we're kinda worried about that right now. There's a lot of uh,
Japan's uh, had a really traumatic
earthquake and tsunami and it was mostly affecting the northern area and most of the sea turtle nesting is in the South of Japan.
Okay, this is the one that we see
um, a lot in Costa Rica with the huge nesting event
called the arribada. What sea turtle's that?
That is the olive ridley.
Olive ridley sea turtle is, actually, all sea turtle species are endangered. Actually the
flatback they say is data deficient, I mean
we really don't know with the flatback because none of the people down there are sharing their research.
There's people doing the research,
but not a lot of it's shared. Unfortunately.
So with the olive ridley, if any sea turtle is going to come off the endangered list, it's probably gonna be the olive ridley.
Recent
in the last couple decades, beach protections
of the olive ridley
have really increased it's population. The survivorship of the babies is up
The fact that they're being born and making it into the ocean
is the key thing.
Um, there's some beaches in Costa Rica
where this sea turtle population comes ashore
in a four to five day cycle called
"arribada." In spanish that means arrival.
Anywhere between one hundred and four hundred thousand sea turtles
all at the same time, nesting.
It's just a crazy flurry.
This is the one
controversial thing Scott and I were talking about
is the first couple days of the arribada it's actually legal, usually it's illegal, to harvest
and take
the sea turtle eggs.
And then they sell them in
bars and so on. In
Costa Rica and a lot of Central America they believe it's like some natural ***, manly thing
to eat the sea turtle egg.
And so
the
problem with that is then anywhere they poach the eggs and bring them to the bars they can say "look, I got them Ostional from this one beach"
And we actually have a whole page that gets a ton of traffic on our website
about the Costa Rica Ostional arribada situation.
'Cause you see these
photos circling around e-mails, and its like
people with these huge bags of sea turtle eggs and
it can be done, and it
can be managed more or less sustainably. The government is involved in a lot,
a lot of conservation projects are down there
monitoring the harvest
uh... it does happen but it is controversial. So here's the one that we're talking about mostly today. Who knows what this one is?
that's the leatherback, okay. So it's the only sea turtle that doesn't have a hard-shelled carapace.
it's the last remaining member of the
uh... family
Dermochelyidae.
All the other sea turtle species are different.
So the leatherback is really unique and we're gonna talk more about that.
So
one of the things that our program does
as a nonprofit, you know,
we have very limited resources,
you know, I'd love to do
science. I'm a scientist and, you know it came to me like we need to just try to increase the awareness
and try to get more observations reported
of these leatherbacks off California so we, two years ago we started the Leatherback Watch Program with our summer intern
and we basically just call up all the boats
and, uh, harbor masters an
whale watching groups and, you know, ask the question "Have you seen this sea turtle?" and
occasionally they do.
And even better now they're connected with us, they know what we need,
they take the photo,
they log the GPS coordinates.
We get those three things
and Scott Benson down at Moss Landing who's a National Marine Fisheries Service lead scientist on the leatherbacks,
he'll accept that as a
valid sighting and put it in his database too.
So we have our database of graded sightings, you know,
like an "A" is when you have those three things, a "B" is like we didn't get a photo but we have an
experienced naturalist and the coordinates,
and so on, you know, down to someone saw it but that person is just a tourist and they didn't get the picture and we don't know exactly where the coordinates were.
You know, that'd be a low grade sighting, but we still record it.
Last summer we recorded about twenty-four sightings. About eight of those had photo, GPS and, you know, an experienced naturalist
handing it over, so really pleased with that.
And so we share the data with NMFS, again,
and we educate, connect and expand awareness. So this is one of my favorite photos. It was taken last summer. Um,
actually 2010.
This one was taken last summer.
and this is an interesting photo right there. You can see these colors on the back of the head. Those
are believed to be unique so that when the
sea turtle is nesting on the
beach you can take a photo of the back of it's head
or in this case we've got the photo and the spot pattern is believed to be unique identifier of individuals so
we're working on that, storing those photos and hopefully in
a couple of years we'll be able to say "Look! It's the same one."
So these are pretty amazing creatures, the leatherbacks. Um, and
we're gonna look at, now, um, what we
have as like the hallmark publication in
2011.
So this is borrowed from
Scot Benson's paper in Ecosphere and
what it is is satellite tracked sea turtles. Leatherbacks that
all nested here in these islands here.
So this is where they're nesting. When they,
when they're out in the water
if you wanna do research it's tough.
It's tough to grab this huge sea turtle, get it on a boat and
work with it. So
when they're nesting is when you have your chance.
All sea turtles, when they're nesting
they go into a trance.
I mean they can be very easily disturbed on their way up,
but once they get in the zone and they have their pit dug
and their eggs are dropping,
um, you know,
if they see you, they're in the zone
and they just keep going and
that could mean that the
poachers have an easy time
but it also gives the scientists a window of
opportunity as they finish laying the eggs and
they're covering it up the scientists can get in there and
put the satellite
tag, actually with the leatherback you can't glue it to the shell, it's like a little backpack they wear and it has these
uh... metal magnesium
rings on it that dissolve in salt water at the same rate the battery runs out so technically the backpack will fall
off
when the battery runs out so it's not something that's
on the sea turtle forever.
Uh... and here we go. So look at these sea turtles. They're going
across the entire Pacific ocean, alright.
So we've got a couple things labeled.
You know, this is uh, Papua
New Guinea
and there's, uh, some other island that, I
forget, and
this is the main one, right here. The main nesting
sight here and there.
Uh... Papua Barat, that's what it is.
In Indonesia right here.
So this island actually has a
border right here of two different nations and this side's Indonesia
and that was where most of the research was done and they found that
there's these main foraging areas. After they nest they either go down
here's to Eastern Australia,
over here to the,
to this zone over off New Zealand. Uh, this is the
Kuroshio Extension current. It's like the Gulf Stream on the other side of the Pacific and, you know,
and analogous to the Atlantic Gulf Stream.
It comes on up, swoops in here, and creates a bit of a North Pacific gyre.
Um, there's a bunch of them that come in,
will go eastern equatorial Pacific. They're hanging out, not so much, but look at all these dots.
Look at all those dots just hanging in there
really dense, really dense.
You know this is the California current ecosystem. This is where we are and this is what
uh... really makes the leatherback the
focus of our conservation area is it needs
this healthy California current ecosystem
and you know as we look a little closer in a second here we'll see the Bay Area is one of the hot spots. So, you know, really cool that
we've been learning about their use in this area. The science that was
really the first satellite tracks these were all across the Pacific was like in 1996, 1994,
depending on which scientist published and
you know, so this is all relatively
new information on the
life history and biology and ecology of these sea turtles.
So
we see now that these green dots, ok, these are the sightings, you know, from
the airplanes and the boats
and then red dots are also sightings but
these are when they're drift
gill net takes like when the observer, there's only observers on
like fifteen percent of the boats,
uh... sees that they've caught a
leatherback sea turtle in the gill net, you know,
that's where the red dots come from.
And the black dots are the satellite tracks, you know the actual individual data points so that you see them swimming in here.
So, we know that
they're endangered. They've been on the endangered species list since 1970.
I mean the endangered species list was born with this animal on it. And
the area that
the animal needs
is it's habitat, right, and so if you have a species on the endangered species list, you want critical habitat designated
for your animal.
Because it's critical habitat we'll do
more environmental review, another level of protection and hurdles
for your animal and so we
petitioned,
the Turtle Island Restoration Network with some allies,
to get critical habitat for leatherback sea turtles off of California
and what we petitioned for
was this area here
and this is actually the
same boundary as the current fisheries management zone known as the
uh... leatherback
conservation area
for the drift gill net fishery.
And we knew enough information in 1998 and 2000
to get that established in 2001
and the drift gill net fishery is closed in the
summer months when the leatherbacks are most common
in that area.
There's still a ton of drift gill net fishing taking place down here
and also some leatherback takes as you can see from these
red dots. So the National Marine Fisheries Service came back to us in 2009 and said,
"see these octagons, see the blue octagon,
you know we divided up the area and we're gonna give you those, that's our proposal."
So seventy-two thousand square miles of habitat.
Pretty good,
you know, they in their proposal said that
you know the two things we're gonna look at are migration and prey and
you know, they put on there
those blue areas near the coast
but, and the claim that
migration was one of thetings they cared about
but they didn't put in the areas that were off shore. So, you know,
we submitted a bunch of comments
and we'll get to that
but this is what we got.
So February twenty-seventh
the critical habitat became final.
And it's happening, it's, it's
it's in gear right now.
I mean this is it. Here's the map. It's the largest
sea turtle protected area in the history of US conservation.
And a lot of it's in California.
So sixteen thousand nine hundred and ten square miles are in California. There's forty-one thousand nine hundred and
fourteen square miles total.
A lot of that's off shore in Oregon and Washington.
Uh... area designated as critical habitat for the leatherback
sea turtle off the West Coast.
So
this is really what I'm here to talk about.You know, we're really proud that we got this here, thank you. After like
five or six years of work. And so we're gonna talk about that. You know, how did we get here? What does it mean? And
what's new? What's next, right?
So here's my little zoom-in
and uh, this is the California one with a little cartoon sea turtle, hey! Alright, so
what happened? We're back in 2007
and there's my timeline
uh... basically you can see we partnered with the
Center for Biological Diversity,
they like to be called the Center,
and uh, Oceana, and
we did the leatherback conservation areas, the foundation for our
petition saying "look, this is already a management zone, it's big, we like that
let's go for it."
And they found it right away, you know, positive finding that our petition was
valid
and then the twelve-month finding was published with a proposed rule in 2009.
Anybody with some quick math
skills is gonna say "wait a minute, that's not twelve months" between '07 and 2010
uh... that was kind of foreboding the delays that we experienced
And here's what the proposal said.
The proposed rule said:
We're gonna focus on the the principal biological or physical constituent elements
within the areas that are central to the
conservation of the species. The primary constituent elements.
If you get into critical habitat, this is what matters. Okay.
And the proposed rule included migratory pathway conditions and the
quality and quantity of prey so
the migratory is the state of the areas through which the leatherbacks
traverse for feeding and reproduction. And then the,
the prey. Okay, so they basically were like
and this is what we do. The leatherbacks need California because they swim here and eat jellyfish. That's what that says.
So, here's the proposal again, um,
I've been doing this talk to much. I kind of jumped to the
punchline of seventy thousand miles when they proposed it and
you know
forty-six
thousand square miles off of California was in the initial proposal
so, you know, we asked for more because that's what we do, um,
we asked for all this, really, you know. We wanted the migration zone
to be covered
you know, we noted that there's a lot of them here, why didn't you include those? Um
and we really wanted water quality
uh... to be a principal constituent element.
In fact the proposed role said "hey, we're considering it. What do you think?" You know,
it was an open comment period.
So we included a bunch of stuff about water quality.
Well, what else did we want?
We wanted fisheries in there
There's direct take, entanglement from gear of the gillnets that impede the migrations
and general ecosystem impacts to the habitats caused by fisheries. Fisheries are the number one threat to the leatherback sea turtle.
Um, vessel strikes. You know there's huge
vessels interfering with migration pathways, and water quality.
Uh... you can narrow down on the plastic pollution
that is known to be lethal to
leatherback sea turtles.
There's actually a publication in 2009 chronicling that
estimating that thirty-seven percent of
leatherbacks in the Pacific Ocean have plastic inside them. Um,
and so there's chemicals that impact
the prey and the sea turtles and the
pollution harms the whole habitat, you know. It harms
the whole ecosystem.
And then obviously we wanted this offshore
migration areas
to connect the habitat. We also asked,
talk about in out comment letters that we
believe that, you know, global warming and ocean acidification were problems too.
So we, you know, we submitted a lot. And
we're back to here, you know, this is what was part of the
proposal
and you know, overall in this comment period that we had we activated our members, our allies and a lot of different groups and
we had over fifty-eight thousand comments
sent in,
you know.Oour particular coalition
sent tens of thousands of letters
and, you know,
a lot of,
all the letters, even the other groups said "look, put the fisheries in there."
We kind of knew that they weren't going to be in there. They
weren't in the proposal. The
reason, rationale is that the fisheries are a direct take and they're
under section seven
of the Endangered Species Act there's a whole process they go through to do an incidental take permit
in the fishery management process.
So, you know the opposition was actually from fisheries, from the Navy, from offshore power,
tribal concerns
which they remedied by
uh... changing the border from the
high high tide to the low low tide. So
now it's low low tide and out and that means the tribes don't have to
worry about, I don't know,
gathering jellyfish in the
low tide zone.
Or it was just the gathering, the gathering
principles that they wanted to uphold
so we're out of their gathering zone
um, economic calculations
uh... were huge
and there was a two hundred page document on the econimics of this.
And the economics actually
were a major driver
in the final decision, so that's a whole other talk that I, you know, don't even want to get in to.
So we have the critical habitat and it was actually interesting, you know, uh, the
National Parks put in some comments up in Point Reyes about the
crab pots
and the
crab pot issue,
if you're really following marine conservation,
you would know that
okay, the Marine Mammal Protection Act, okay,
that's kind of self explanatory, it
classifies fisheries.
And a category one fishery
is the most deadly.
There's category two and category three.
Recently in 2011 they reclassified the
lobster
and crab
fishery in Maine and
the upper Northeast
as a category one fishery for whales
because of the crab pot lines, because of the floats entangling whales. So this is
really an issue, you know, and I was really
surprised. You know I talk to the National Park
people over there and I didn't know they submitted that comment and I found out later by going through the comments that were in the public record.
So it was interesting. You know there are some things to look at in the next steps.
So the final rule was this January.
It went into effect in February.
Uh... they eliminated the migratory pathway, Insufficient information.
The prey PCE was further defined to include
density. Nothing else was added.
And the protected areas were defined, really,
and reshaped by prey density estimates.
So, you know, it's interesting 'cause I met one of the grad students who did one of the
only studies on jellyfish density off California and
you know, then here we are. There's this Masters student grad
student.
You know, her research probably shaped this more than anything.
Um, and it was really focused on the,
the prey.
The migratory pathway, if you read in,
what it said is,
is if you remember those slides with the migrating leatherbacks,
you know, they wanted a pathway. They wanted to protect a
corridor for
migration.
When they looked at it, they see that leatherbacks don't follow road maps. They're not on a freeway with definitions.
They're just headed over. You know, the currents are different every year.
Every year the oceanography's a little different. The warm spot, the cold spot, whatever they're looking for changes. The National
Marine Fisheries Service didn't see a clear corridor, you know, so they didn't protect it.
That was what their rationale was, was they wanted a
pathway but they didn't see a pathway. They saw a random track
so they didn't know how to deal with that. So that's insufficient
information.
So that's where we are. We have prey density
as the final, you know,
critical habitat
driver. And so the, the,
the positive thins is, um, they actually moved this
Oregon one from about
here down to Cape Blanco because this is a really productive upwelling zone and
there are a lot of leatherbacks seen just off here, so that's really nice and that's what we got.
So this is it. They've set up
critical habitat. You know, what is what's the difference?
With the fisheries, like I said, they remain under the Endangered Species Act section seven
management.
But right now, you know, there's a new proposal that they're
looking into
expanding one of these deadly fisheries in there so,
you know, I put up there check it out on the website
for what's new.
Uh... offshore oil activities. That's the big one
in a lot of peoples mind.
Uh, when you have critical habitat in your offshore
oil or any federal EIS document, if you have critical habitat it's another checkbox. And, you know,
for years and years with sea turtles there's been no checkboxes for critical habitat.
And so now you've got the checkbox so people looking at offshore
permitting
and offshore construction have that checkbox. And what does that mean? That just means additional environmental
review. You know, how will this impact leatherback
foraging? How will it impact the
prey species
of the leatherback?
So offshore power, not just oil,
are also subject to this additional review.
The other big one, big one, big one
is, um,
is this. The desalinization and
cooling intake pipes
are known
to
bring in jellyfish polyps, the small lifestages of jellyfish and they don't come back
out. You know,
they go in but they don't come
back out as
viable jellyfish. So the
intake issue
with a lot proposed
desalinization plants along California is a real
hot one with the
uh... leatherback critical habitat being finalized.
And it's a hot one with a lot of people. The Ocean Protection
Council recently published tey're
strategic plan
and they want to uphold, you know, the stricter
intake guidelines,
stricter than the desal people want. They're saying "look, we're different than this other cooling
once through
cooling. We're not those guys, we're these guys."
So
it's going to be interesting moving forward.
This is a slide that
I had put together awhile ago.
In 2010 we were in the Gulf of Mexico and the sea turtles were covered in oil. And we were doing our best to
increase rescue efforts. We did a lot of work raising the public's awareness and about a
couple months
later the rescue teams had tripled and they were
by the end of the oil spill
thanks a lot to our awareness and pestering
there were more sea turtles rescued in one day than in the entire first couple months of the
oil spill. They had three
boat teams instead of one. They really went through
rapid expansion, training and so on. And this was really
monumental because the BP oil spill was the first time that the
recovery efforts went out to the ocean to recover and recuperate the animals.
The status quo is wait until they wash in and see what you can do.
Uh... so we got them out there.
It's a long story. I was actually approved to do it and then we sued and then we got them to shut down in-situ burning,
but then I was off the team, so oh well.
But I think we saved more sea turtles with that action, stopping the burning, than I probably could have from a boat with my two hands, but
still. Really an interesting summer
and we got a big coalition together focused on offshore oil, focused on the,
increasing the rescue, and this is something we continue to
leverage, you know down the road.
This is the example I like to say
that, you know, in the environmental impact statements for the offshore leases they estimate that
a major oil spill occurring during the forty year lifetime of the proposed action, right, all of the drilling, you know,
they can imagine in forty years in the Gulf of Mecico would total sixty-six injured and
one dead
Kemp's ridley sea turtle and in the BP oil spill there was four hundred and eighty-one that
were killed.
Six hundred and nine total sea turtles.
Uh... we're still looking at that in terms of how much was fisheries because we know that the shrimp fishery went gangbusters right before the
oil hit and they, um, were probably responsible for some
of those sea turtle deaths.
So what's next? Um, we're looking at this swordfish
fishery in California.
That's a drift gillnet. Our law team has filed a FOIA on the
process to kinda see what else we can learn. Our plastic pollution coalition is
engaged in the water
quality information and,
yeah, more science is needed. Isn't that always the story? More science is needed
to fill in the gaps, to try
to figure out where
insufficient information can become sufficient information and we can maybe
go back to them and ask for another look at what happened.
And that's where we're at now, you know.
We're going through this process
but who cares, right? You know
this is kind of this obscure area you look at, and you can't see it. You can't even really
see a leatherback. Well, you know, hopefully everyone
here is with me,
you know, that we care.
And this is why, I mean this is a
picture, a real close-up great shot.
My favorite shot of a leatherback that we got in last summer from the Leatherback Watch Program. You know this guy had a great camera and he's a boat captain that does
sanctuary cruises, and, uh
we're still in touch with Captain Mike and he's rebuilt his website with a
whole page on leatherbacks. He loves them now too.
So let's talk a little bit about the leatherback
sea turtle biology, ecology and I'm gonna
spend the next fifteen or twenty minutes on this but
do you guys have any questions
about
the critical habitat thing. [Audience member] Well not really but I have a question about the
tracking.
So if you're tracking nesting turtles these are females, presumably, right?
Do you have any idea what males do? Do they follow the ladies? [Chris Pincetich] Good question.
The question is, the
nesting
research is females,
right.
What about the males? That is a good question and there's a lot we don't know. There's a lot we don't know about sea turtles in
general. Leatherbacks specifically.
The males
that we have data on were caught off California
by Scott and his team
so they went out there in their boat and they had airplanes, and the airplanes told them where the sea turtles were and they went and got them and they put a big net on them and they got them on
board. They had a special boa with
no sides, get 'em on because you can't lift 'em over the thing and
they were able to get the backpack on a couple males.
So some of that data is males but
generally speaking,
a male sea turtle leaves the beach, you know with no parents around it and
never comes back until it's dead. It's in the ocean its whole life.
Breeding and feeding.
[Audience member] The, uh, boundary of the new protection area
since it's a US protection, I assume it ended at the Mexican border?
In the South? My question is
is there a corollary or a
corresponding protection area
south? [Chris] No.
There's no other area.
This is it. I mean the
area and it's here
this is another line. This is our exclusive economic zone. This is what we have jurisdiction over.
But yeah, it doesn't even go into Southern California. So the drift gillnet fisheries
really active off of here. They have no
worries. They're outside of it.
So it's this area here. And this outer edge is defined by three thousand
meters, not three thousand
feet, and this is, uh,
two thousand meters.
So, you know, it's a bigger
shelf. Ours drops off quicker. Um,
and then it goes down to eighty meter depth. So, you know,
that's how deep
the most common feeding is. But we'll talk more about the biology of the leatherback.
So then in Mexico, oh my gosh, Mexico is kind of deadly zone for sea turtles in general.
[Audience member] Why is that middle section skipped? The..
[Chris] Well, the
satellite tracking
data showed that there wasn't a lot of action in
that area. And so,
they said,
"We don't see a lot of leatherbacks,
we're not gonna use that area," you know, they
they had the economic analysis really driving a
choice of
only the most important stuff because they were afraid that if it was
critical habitat it would
exclude some things and make some people nervous, there were more rules
so they didn't want to give us everything.
Uh... they tried to, you know, rationalize minimization and
efficiency so the designation of the
critical habitat and there just wasn't a lot of tracking data to support it. Now, you know, let's keep track of them, keep looking at our data and maybe
in ten years
which, you know,
I don't even think we have
ten years data
really. You know
another ten years then our data will double and we'll see.
Uh... but right now that's the ruling.
So let's talk about the leatherback. It's the largest species of
sea turtle in the world. It grows over
eight feet and over two thousand pounds.
Uh... it's the deepest diving sea turtle. It's known to dive up to eighteen hundred feet deep to
search for food, I mean we don't know what. I mean we usually see jellyfish at the surface
but they're going down there
and they're foraging the zones.
They don't do these deep dives on their migratory transits. It's when they
get to the foraging areas like we saw earlier. The squares,
the different ecosystem zones is
when they do the deep diving. The,
the migration,
when it first
sets out from the
beach,
they've been tracked to go over thirty miles a day.
It's the largest global range of any reptile on earth. They've tracked it going through all the oceans and equatorial regions and
up in to the cold regions.
It survived the extinction of the dinosaurs over one hundred million years ago
basically unchanged.
You see one of these creatures you're looking at a living dinosaur,
a lot like a great white shark or
crocodile or sturgeon.
Uh... the Pacific populations are much
much less than
the Atlantic
populations of leatherback sea turtles, and then the West Pacific
is greater
than the East Pacific population, so
let's think about that. Are we in the West
Pacific in California or East Pacific? Yeah, we're in the East Pacific.
And the East Pacific sea turtles nest in, um,
Mexico,
a lot of them in Costa Rica, and you know, in those Central American countries.
And that one
population of sea turtles is in the most
trouble. And the
western population of sea turtles that actually come off California
are all born and nest in Indonesia and
uh...the Papua Barat area near Papua New Guinea. Pretty interesting.
And this is the only sea turtle that's adapted to cold.
You know, reptiles are cold blooded. Reptiles,
when they get cold they slow down.
Their metabolism slows down and everything slows down
and generally the sea turtles on shore in California,
it's cold. And it's sick and it needs to get
into the hospital and then they truck it down to San Diego and they warm it up and release it down there.
Uh... the
leatherback,
that's not a problem.
Because of these adaptations.
It has a counter-current circulatory system a lot like a bluefin tuna. Um,
it has thick layers of fat, this gigantothermy, you know
the bigger you are, the smaller your surface to volume ratio. That's just general physics.
And the ability to elevate the body temperature through metabolic activity really helps. And it's the most efficient swimmer
of all sea turtles. Three times more hydrodynamically efficient. It's believed that the,
the ridges and
the little bumps on the ridges really help. You know, they
they channel
the sea turtle to be on a straighter path which keeps thrust
and the, um, I don't know if you ever looked,
like vortices, you know the
vortices that break up the laminar flow
can be caused by those little bumps,
you know to make it more efficient
as it swims through the water.
Pretty amazing.
And it's also
basically eating jellyfish.
And it selects the higher calorie jellyfish, the brown sea nettle versus the moon jelly.
And so it's got this basic life history of, you know,
in the ocean, eating jellyfish. And
we know jellyfish have been around since the dinosaurs and beyond. Jellyfish may be, you know, the first
living thing in this planet.
So, you know it's figured out a good way to stay alive. You just need
jellyfish and
you just need an ocean. Um,
and a beach, but some of that's running out.
So industrial fishing is the biggest problem for these sea turtles. Um,
the issue is bycatch. You know, that is
uh... some people like to say bykill.
Uh...that's when
something's caught that they didn't mean to catch and
in many cases like the leatherback, it's an endangered species, you can't just take it home with you, you've got to throw it back.
How the survivorship is after it's been
caught, brought on board and thrown back we really don't know. You know,
a lot of the observer sheets will say that it was released alive.
And, but, does that mean it's gonna live another year? We're not sure. Um,
so they're critically endangered, they're vulnerable to all this stuff we already talked about.
Vessel strikes, predation by sharks is one of them
that we didn't talk about.
And then, um, down here s some more stuff.
Illegal poaching, nesting beach destruction, light pollution,
fossil fuel frenzy,
global warming,
are all threats to global sea turtle populations. But those are threats that we're not necessarily experiencing
in our back yard.
I like to try to focus on California and what
we can do
as Californians
which you know are some of these issues here. The vessel strikes, and the coastal pollution, and the fisheries.
And those are the issues we work a lot on. And,
you know we've got this T-shirt and it used to be one of our
main things is, you know, is how long can leatherbacks live, you know. I was
talking to Scott earlier. He brought up
this, uh
1994 edition of National Geographic with
sea turtles. There's a brilliant article in here.
And, uh, they really question
the ability of the sea turtles to survive another
twenty years in the Pacific Ocean.
And this is a great illustration of, like, a
dinosaur and down here there's like an
archaic leatherback sea turtle.
And so this is, I really want
to get an update on this, I'm sorry I don't have it.
But I know for a fact that the
Costa Rica Playa Grande nesting is still down to about forty or fifty individuals.
And sometimes these individuals
nest four or five times, so you
might see that there's like two or three hundred nests, but that's really only
forty or fifty individual leatherback sea turtles coming back to the main nesting beach, Playa Grande,
in Costa Rica. So that's in the North Pacific.
And this is the extinction risk analysis right here.
Extinction
risk analysis. So 1.0, that's 100% probability of extinction.
And with the error bars, I mean, they're really reaching that
within twenty years. And that's,
this is some of the foundation of the stuff that
National Geographic talked about in the article is this study.
Uh... that they
don't have a lot of time left at the current rate that they're being
captured, killed
et cetera. But honestly, things have changed a lot
uh... since the
early 1990s, the
the early 2000s. We've had some real progress
with management of
industrial fishing. These are the two big culprits: longline and gillnet.
Longline is just that, it's long. And gillnet is
a big net, you know,
big holes, not little holes, big holes.
And this is
a diagram showing
the legal drift gillnet off California.
In fact, this is an old slide that I borrowed from an old presentation.
It is no longer valid because Oregon has banned 'em.
So if Oregon has banned the drift gillnet,
drift gillnets are banned by the United Nations on the high seas,
but they're still allowed offshore in California. And that's something
we're focusing more and more on is why and how come. And how and we
stop that? Because they're spending a lot of time in the Fisheries Management Council
debating this
and they're not ready to give up the conservation area that we've already established. They realize that that's a valid decision and
just the management time being
spent talking about this
difficult fishery is
enough in our mind to
make it go away, you know, let's move on.
Stop trying to
fix something that's so obviously broken.
Uh... so this is global pelagic
longline fishing effort,
again an old slide,
but, uh, it really tells the picture of the density.
So if you have this color down here, you're at twenty-six
to forty-seven, or forty-two million hooks per area.
You know, this is like twelve to twenty-six million hooks.
Um, there's estimated to be a billion to two billion longline hooks in the ocean at any given time.
And so yeah, if you're in the Mediterranean you're a sea turtle, you know,
hang on. You know, that's going to be a
rough ride.
You know this is an area over here where the leatherbacks go, right in here. The Eastern Equatorial Pacific. And,
you know, this is an area where obviously there's a lot of nesting, so this is
don't go over here if you're a sea turtle. So the leatherbacks, you know,
really
are threatened by longline. It's really not so much because they eat the bait, just
the fact that the longline
catches them on the shoulder and
holds them down is all it takes. The
leatherback needs to breath
and that's the problem. I mean, if it gets caught on a short leader and it can breath,
there' a good chance it will get to the boat and they'll cut the line and it'll just have a line off of it
for awhile, um,
until it comes to a nesting beach and someone takes it
off.
Um... and that's fine, um
not fine, but that sea turtle will live. You know,
it's the ones that are caught down on the deep lines and
they can't make it back to the air, and if they don't
get 'em in a couple hours. And a lot of times these longlines are set out overnight or for a couple days. So
who knows how long the average longline is? Take a guess.
Two hundred feet? Longer.
A thousand feet
is a long line. Longer.
So what do we think?
A thousand feet,
ten miles, or one hundred miles?
It's more like ten to fifty miles,
is the average longline.
Yeah, ten to fifty miles long and you know, the ones in
Korea and Japan are definitely in the
thirty to forty mile long.
Uh... the average longline
like the, the Florida swordfish longline fishery that just got certified by the Marine Stewardship Council as eco-friendly
even though it kills sea turtles,
that averages twelve and a half mile long lines. That's why they
call them long. So,
the plastic issue is not just eating it but it's also entanglement.
This looks a lot like the crab pots. Um,
I do a lot of beach clean-ups and stuff, and that's a thing that,
um,
my friend calls blue steel. It's this rope
we see all of the time. It's so
strong. This
rope is amazingly strong.
And so we're talking now about the plastic
pollution issue. You know,
here's our ocean. Here's a couple
gyres that trap stuff that's floating and lot of it is litter nowadays.
So the litter it's degrading and sinking eventually but for many years it's
floating in this
kind of soup issue and this is what was
in the Chronicle,
estimated to be like
three hundred feet below, you know, within the
diving range of a lot of animals,
within the feeding range of a lot of the layers that come up to feed at night,
um, a lot of the deep water fish come up to feed at night. And you know, is it a patch, is it the soup, either way it's a plastic buffet for the sea turtles.
And this is a picture of the inside, really
interesting biology here.
Form equals function
is this is the throat, the esophagus, of the leatherback. It has these spikes. It's a one-way street. You know if
you're a jellyfish, you go in, you don't come out.
And they can't, sea turtles physically can not regurgitate their food. It's a
one way street. That's how they've evolved.
And, um, in talking to people, more and more people,
that do work on the, and this is all out of one sea turtle, this pile.
Um, you know, talking with the
people that do this kind of research,
uh... and a really resonating statement is that
everything on this planet
is edible except plastic.
For animals. And if you think about it, it's kind of true. You know, there's organisms that eat dirt,
and
get stuff out of it like worms, you know they
filter feed the ocean,
you know, they chew on trees like fungus
and mushrooms can actually
digest the cellulose, but no one right now knows of an organism that can actually eat plastic.
Uh... it's something that we created and put in the ecosystem.
So I've got a research permit with Ben Becker up at Point Reyes National
Seashore
and I've been doing density surveys of the plastic pollution in the ocean. It's actually
marine debris and
people that are advocates tell me "say plastic pollution" and, you knw, as a
scientis I say marine debris because it's not just plastic I'm tallying, um and I'm
coordinating
with a lot of people to figure out
you know, when they're doing they're beach clean-ups. I try to get my data at times when they're not.
But like with Surf Rider, I'm doing one before and
after the clean-up to kind of add some validation
of this method and the cleanup.
And I'm looking at the density,
the distribution, and then I'm trying to get more
done on
this recruitment issue but I'm
realizing that Ben doesn't want to like let
me just camp out on a beach and
shut an area down to
people so we're getting there but that's what
it's going to take, you know,
an area that
no one disturbs. And then we'll see how much comes in every day.
So I'm working on that.
And the density is the big thing.
So, you know, I'm doing a study area of known
size and measuring it every time on a transect
and if you look around a lot of people will talk
about plastic pollution anecdotally, you know,
"look at this giant bag."
"It weighs thirty pounds, people, this is a lot of trash, right?"
Well is it that one tire that
weighs thirty pounds, and you know, so it's really hard to get to the bottom of
it so one way to do it is density, you know,
items per area, and that's where I'm at now.
I mean going to the next level would be measuring every item, but
ooff, that's going to take forever. So I'm not doing it that way.
So I'm working on it.
I was down in Costa Rica, saw the leatherback.
Amazing.
Here's the leatherback egg,
the largest sea turtle egg.
And the beach patrols, we try to wear black.
Uh... this particular couple was on board.
They had paid a fee to kind of go
along for the night and that's how they can
make some money to keep the project going actually.
And then this is the newest news.
So our organization has just begun an effort.
We have a bill sponsored in Sacramento
to name the leatherback as the
official state symbol, one of the official state symbols
to make it the official marine reptile of the State of California.
And just like there's the poppy and the garibaldi, you know,
we want to say leatherback.
So that when kids are in the classroom, they learn about the leatherback as one of the most important
things for California in terms of the animals and the
different symbols that we look towards.
So we're excited to move that
forward.
We're gonna need your help.
I did a seminar recently where I passed out paper, letterhead, and we all wrote to them. You know,
I'm running out of time right now
but I have a couple things
up here.
So, you know, now that you've learned a little
bit about us, I'll just send these around and we can pass these around. We'll start with this one. This one's kind of the event sign-in form. And it has some
checkboxes and it has an area for notes if you're into like
"I want to volunteer on the weekend" you can write that on the notes
or like
contact me about this. You know,
I'm trying to speak to as many people as a can. Clubs, groups.
And this right here is the
help pass the leatherback bill.
You know, the leatherback bill is AB1776, so we got a pretty cool number,
And the sponsor is Fong who sponsored the shark fin ban. So, you know, I approached him at his little victory party for
shark fins and he was really psyched on
continuing ocean conservation and
loved this idea and
he's our main sponsor.
So this is really for California residents, I think that's just about everybody here. And uh,
no pressure, I just want to share that. I also got, uh, some
newsletters up here.
I'll just leave these. We don't need to pass them around unless you wanted.
And, you know,
this is the new website that we have, AB1776 and that's me.
I've got another slide
with my contact info coming up. And this is
what I really want to see you guys at next is our big event. May 11 we're gonna do a
seminar day.
The Bluemind seminar series.
Uh... J Nchols is a friend. He's
on our board of directors. He's a sea turtle researcher. He's the
guy in 1996 that did satellite on the back of the
loggerheads swimming across the Pacific Ocean. It was the first time anyone had really
publicized the fact that the sea turtle swims
across the entire ocean. And the Pacific being the biggest it was
a big deal. So
we're gonna be at the Romberg Tiburon Center. We're partnering with San Francisco State to do a day of
uh... seminars on
sharks, on leatherbacks, on plastic pollution,
eel grass and
ecosystems in the bay.
And it's going to be free for students, and other folks, we're gonna ask for,
we'll see what you can contribute. It's no big deal. And then we're gonna do
in the evening, the Bluemind.
You know, this is where right hear it says
"we're turning this idea in to a movement." That's J with his
Bluemind
connecting all these conservation issues with neuroscience because it's really,
as you'll learn as you go, the neuroscience is the
focus of a lot of corporations, industry, and marketing professionals right now.
It's like how do we think and how do we make our decisions, and, you know,
we'll learn about that. And it's pretty fascinating.
And how the ocean, you know, is one of the
stronger connections we
have with the waves, and all the waves and the universe in our hearts and in our minds.
And so the other thing I jst wanted to throw out
there is this Plastics 360 event is
this weekend in Marin.
It's sponsored by Green Sangha and ourselves.
And we've got a great team together to talk about plastic pollution and ourselves and our society and the ocean. If you've ever
gotten at all into this issue,
the book I recommend
is called Plastic, a Toxic Love Story and it's a big yellow book and the author of that is gonna be at our event. She lives here in the Bay Area.
So that's gonna be a lot of fun.
I hope you guys can keep in touch,
and that's my last slide I think.
Thanks for your time, you know, thanks for
anything you can sign up for, and let me know if you have any questions.
Questions, yes? [Audience] Where does most of your funding come from?]
[Chris] Oh my gosh, so most of the funding,
what is most?
I think mostly private foundations,
especially for the Sea Turtle Restoration Project, but
more and more, almost half is individuals.
Individuals are becoming more and more an important, consistent, ok, you know your love for the sea turtles doesn't
fade with that budget cycle like other foundations, your
401k tanked and now they don't want to give as much because they've got to reign
it in.
We do have some funding from
agencies, you know, especially for the SPAWN
project, not so much for the
sea turtle project.
And then again, so it's really diverse, you know
the projects working together under one roof
sometimes if
one comes up short, which is usually SPAWN,
we can add.
And the sea turtles, you know, being twenty years of history, we've got
a lot of key people, you know,
across the nation, all over the world that really know we're one of the most
acutely focused on the
policy stuff, you know a lot of the
sea turtle projects, you know they're partnering with agencies
on the beach with those permits doing the hands on stuff and
we need that
but those people aren't in a position
to go argue with the funders and
say, you know, I know you're the National Marine Fisheries Service and you're managing my beach but you're also managing the fishery that's killing 'em.
So that limits their ability to
do some of the work that we do which is
more direct policy suggestions.
Thank you.